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This Troubled Land: Voices from Northern Ireland on the Front Lines of Peace
When American journalist Patrick Michael Rucker learned of the Northern Ireland peace accord signed on Good Friday, 1998, he knew he had to return. Rucker had last seen this torn country in 1991, when “the troubles” raged at a fever pitch of daily bombings and murder. Could such a violently divided society truly live in peace? What had changed? In the fall of 1998, Rucker returned to Belfast to see for himself, and this stark, gritty, spellbinding book is his report.
A fearless and brilliant reporter, Rucker sought out victims and killers, leading IRA terrorists and the loyalist counterparts bent on assassinating them, British soldiers and innocent bystanders swept helplessly into an endless undeclared war. Rucker watched as Michelle Williamson chained herself outside a prison to protest the release of the IRA prisoner whose bomb killed her innocent parents. He visited the hospital room of Liam Cairns, a young man abducted by an IRA “punishment gang” and beaten beyond recognition. He tracked down the children of Jean McConville, a widow abducted and killed decades ago for aiding a British solider–a tragic mistake that the IRA finally was ready to admit. There are scores of encounters like these in the pages of This Troubled Land , shocking portraits of a society caught in a nightmare of rage and despair.
But as Rucker discovers, despair has now begun to give way to a different mood–not forgiveness and reconciliation, exactly, for the wounds are still too raw, but a weary longing for closure. Rucker sees glimmers of hope in a Protestant mother murmuring an apology to a Catholic widow, in talk of forgetting the past, in the jarring vision of a glass-roofed double-decker bus carrying tourists down Belfast’s Madrid Street, where just a few years ago bullets flew between the Catholics and the Protestants.
In vivid, electrifying prose, Rucker captures the soul of a country at a critical juncture, a country finally putting the darkest moments of its past behind and daring to look ahead.
A fearless and brilliant reporter, Rucker sought out victims and killers, leading IRA terrorists and the loyalist counterparts bent on assassinating them, British soldiers and innocent bystanders swept helplessly into an endless undeclared war. Rucker watched as Michelle Williamson chained herself outside a prison to protest the release of the IRA prisoner whose bomb killed her innocent parents. He visited the hospital room of Liam Cairns, a young man abducted by an IRA “punishment gang” and beaten beyond recognition. He tracked down the children of Jean McConville, a widow abducted and killed decades ago for aiding a British solider–a tragic mistake that the IRA finally was ready to admit. There are scores of encounters like these in the pages of This Troubled Land , shocking portraits of a society caught in a nightmare of rage and despair.
But as Rucker discovers, despair has now begun to give way to a different mood–not forgiveness and reconciliation, exactly, for the wounds are still too raw, but a weary longing for closure. Rucker sees glimmers of hope in a Protestant mother murmuring an apology to a Catholic widow, in talk of forgetting the past, in the jarring vision of a glass-roofed double-decker bus carrying tourists down Belfast’s Madrid Street, where just a few years ago bullets flew between the Catholics and the Protestants.
In vivid, electrifying prose, Rucker captures the soul of a country at a critical juncture, a country finally putting the darkest moments of its past behind and daring to look ahead.
- GenresHistory
240 pages, Hardcover
First published January 29, 2002
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
April 18, 2016
One thing I really like about this book is the way the author interviewed real people and brought them to life. You're not going to get a lot of hard facts and dates in this book, but you will get a good look at some of the people of Northern Ireland and their attitudes, or at least one man's impression of them.
June 29, 2017
A better subtitle for this book might be "The Legacy of there Republican Movement in Northern Ireland." The book is disappointingly onesided in its coverage spending the vast majority of its time discussing the impact of various IRA activities, with a focus on their impact within the Catholic community. Lip-service is paid to loyalist militias and the Protestant community, primarily in the context of community relations. Most troubling it's the constant use of weasel-word s: when discussing Republican abuses, the text is structured in an antagonistic fashion missing in the limited discussion s of Loyalist abuse. Overall, interesting but flawed.
May 23, 2011
I'm not sure why I find the troubles so interesting, but I do. This book did a wonderful job of explaining the conflicts. The author interviewed lots of families and individuals and then retold their personal stories. Having just been in Belfast, I could picture some of the places he was writing about.
August 5, 2012
Rucker's investigations are all true and interesting in their own right, but leaves you feeling in despair through the end. May have benefited with more accounts of the difficulties of cross-community work as well as the willingness by many in Northern Ireland to live in their own segregated worlds.
January 30, 2014
I too recently was in Belfast and found the personnel stories very enlightening. When the author moved to more details about the political parts of the story, I felt the direction of the book changed too much.
March 19, 2011
Better than most of the book about the Troubles - and more current
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews